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TV News Declining As Fast As Newspaper Readership | TV News

A shocking new report suggest a bleak future for channels like Sky News, BBC News and other 24 hour news stations. Researchers at Oxford University have calculated that in many cases 24 hour news is less popular and in worse shape than that of newspapers.

This is bad news as newspapers like The Independent have already been forced online due to low demand. If TV News is in worse shape than that then its existence has to be called into question.

The BBC have already made drastic cuts, moving BBC 3 online whilst keeping other channels like BBC News, Parliament and even extending their ruining time of CBBC. This all comes down to the Royal Charter which forces the BBC to make shows that entertain, inform and educate but the growing indifference towards such channels is alarming.

The study showed that a viewer of BBC 1 is now more than an average reader of the Daily Mail and has increased from 52 in 2009 to 59 in 2014. Viewing figures for the population as a whole declined form a high of 241 mins in 2012, helped by events like the Olympics, to 216 mins last year, a staggering 10% drop in just 3 years.

The US is worse with about a 15% drop in viewing mins in the same period. More amazingly TV ownership has also declined for the first time ever, people now use laptops, phones and tablets to watch TV through free to use catch-up services.

Completion form Netflix, Amazon, BT, Virgin And many others, has meant that traditional TV is no longer dominant and struggling to capture the imagination of the younger markets in particular.

Social Media, like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and so on, was shown in the study to be the main source of news and calls into question whether BBC, ITV ands C4 will continue showing news at all. Is the news at 6 and 10 a thing of the past?